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Thoughts on your MIDI Mapping Interface...

Dear Pioneer,

To be honest your MIDI interface is a joke, it's just about usable but I use Bome's Midi Translator anyway and can get around all your silly limitations. I appreciate this software is young for you and it works with your controllers you put on the market.

That said you need to address some very basic as far as I am concerned MIDI I/O parameters/options.

1. Remove the 1 midi command limit to controls. Most of the time I want 1 button to do more than 1 thing and as it stands I have to use Bome's to send out multiple midi notes or CC's then isolate them and map them to the multiple controls I want to use in Rekorbox. Similarly the next point applies here too, if I had modifiers I would have a shift button and if that mod was of a value set the same damn MIDI command would ignore one use and be applied in the other, instead of the shift key making the MIDI output different from the controller perspective.

2. Modifiers: We Need MODIFIERS! We need to create soft/hot Shift keys or Pages. It's really long and lame to have to do this outside of rekordbox.

3. MIDI Out values setable seperate to MIDI input values. My APC40 uses values too small (between 0 and 6) for rekordbox to count them as officially ON or too big to count as officially OFF to control the colour of its lights. I do not want the lights to be OFF but rekordbox needs to recieve 0.

4. Accept MIDI off code 80 with a value of 7F(127) as equivalent to on code 90 with a value of 00 (0). This is frustrating much with the APC40 and I'm translating all off codes to the latter 90 xx 00 to get the response from pads turning off on release. Mapping 2 controls 1 for 90 and 1 for 80 is redundant and time consuming and glitchy.

5. Midi Controls for everything in the software. I mean for god's sake I still have to do some things with a mouse... E.g. CFX Edit Mode and CFX Select Up/Down or even better direct access to the individual FX, CFX ON/OFF would be nice too, FX1 ASSIGN Sampler and Master... so many things missing.

I have been a Traktor DJ for years and I've bought both of your softwares. I have 2 CDJ2000NXS and a DJM900NXS, unsurprisingly you make them sound so much better than Traktor does, but let's get the functionality right.

Robbie

** EDIT **

Changed the post title to encourage YOU, this reader to add your findings to the thread!

Great to see other users chipping in... I'm going to keep posting in this thread every bit of MIDI limitation/annoyance i find, hopefully others will follow suit and perhaps we'll get the things we like implemented.

From what I have had to work out for myself; again this is aching and boring to have to realise by trial and error:

There is no point to SamplerPlay 9-16...

Mapping these to any deck 1-4 clearly shows that only 8 are available.

9=1 and 16=8 for deck 1 and 3 on the left side or 2 & 4 on the right side.

At the very least this should give you access to the 4 banks, and the most sense would be to make SamplerPlay1-16 for deck 1 & 2 be banks 1 - 4 of the left side and then SamplerPlay1-16 Decks 3 & 4 be banks 1-4 on the right side.

Also it seems that there is only 8 sequences you can save in memory,

even though at 1st glance there are a possible 32 slots between 4 decks.

Using save to deck 1 a sequence appears in the pattern related slot on all 4 decks this happens for all deck assignments, however renaming the slot is deck specific: in my case I renamed slot 1 on deck 3 to "4 Kicks" and then deleted it and re-saved a new recorded sequence to the same deck and the title was still "4 Kicks" however on all other decks it was "P1" and a pattern was present.

This is not how I want this to work.

How it should work is you can load 8 different patterns per deck (32 total), and only have 8 playable at once. The name of the sequence should follow the sequence and if deleted be deleted. Dragging sequences around to other decks could also prove useful and the name would need to follow it.

Similarly loading pattern 2 from any deck should load it into pattern 2 of the sampler.

What happens is it is loaded to the sampler pattern you are on and so overwrites the original leaving you to either overdub back in the bit's you just lost or have to move up and reload the initial pattern.

Bank changing whilst playing patterns

This is frustrating when you want to play along with patterns you have made but weren't on the correct bank when you trigger the sequence. You should be able to switch bank anytime.

Lastly while on Sampler Function

Loading samples individually only is retarded:

There should be a way to load all samples from a folder to the sampler with a single click or drag and drop, if there is i haven't found it, then there should be a midi code to load folder or even just do it by playlist style savable lists, but it should be doable.

I think that's it for this rant. Someone at Pioneer should respond to this thread or i fear like everything, I'm preaching to the converted

I have had yet further thoughts on the One MIDI command single use policy from the 1st post and wanted to give a further example of where this really is a frustration when trying to port existing popular devices like my APC 40 natively into rekordbox dj.

So it's very obvious that the Velocity Sampler may be more desireable to use than the straight sampler, particularly when sequencing drums. Naturally many devices output velocity from their pads.

In the specific case of my APC this is not, however with the launchpad it is definitely something you would instantly think of.

So in the case of the launchpad, as i seem to remember, it outputs MIDI Note with velocity. Mapping to the Velocity Sampler Play will not only prevent you mapping to the velocity control itself, but also not trigger below a velocity of 63 (or wherever your limit is set to count as OFF, which i have previously proven is not 0). Mapping to the velocity control you have no way to trigger the sample from the same pad without the use of again something like Bomes MT to take in 1 message and send out as 2 one note on/off with velocity 7F and 00 and 1 with a CC value for the actual velocity.

And also this would cause problems on the midi feedback side as the wonderful people @ novation decided upon the most user unfriendly structure for light manipulation i've dealt with. There is no "range" as such which outputs the seperate colours at a consistent brightness, they're spread across all the values and some are dimmer than others and some are flashing. The programmers notes don't make it much clearer either going on about ratios and the what-not, but my point stands that if using your system i used velocity in to output light colour here you would not get a recognisable scale of colours or dimmers, but actually get whatever that value happens to correspond to in launchpad land, without some heavy translation.

This applies also to TouchOSC which has the option to convert x/y tap position on a button to velocity, but it still comes out as a single MIDI command, 9* ** vel and 8* ** vel; and requires low values for Colour changing.

I feel your pain robbie, only just went to reprogram some stuff today & found i couldn't. I have come from traktor too & the midi possibilities there are much greater. (Actually the fx quality on traktor is better too. Keylock on rekordbox is far superior though.)

FX1/2 SelectDown. There is selectUP, but what if i want to use an encoder! We need encode support here.

FX AssignSampler

Can the sound color fx buttons be midi mappable too please?

Also can the fx settings be remembered between sessions? I don't just mean the "save snapshot" feature. Can you remember single/multi fx mode for both beat fx & color fx. And remembering on/off settings & fx channel assign settings.

Hello all I'm back to confirm that @ 4.2.1 none of the above "thoughts" have been addressed as yet. I'm glad to inspire people to add their requests to this list; the longer it grows the better rekordbox should get... eventually.

I do have to add here that in typical pioneer style they've obviously been working on 2 things for a while now, 1 which is totally shit and useless to anyone playing a real DJ set not to kids: ahem, Active Censor, and more importantly 64bit rekordbox and subsequently drivers of the same ilk for all of there hardware. Only taken about 3 or 4 years of people asking for it, and for them to release DJ software rather than just track management...

Anyway it looks like they may have some major expansion plans on the tabs front in rekordbox decks and if that's the case checking for these open mapping options is a continuous line but no fish. Come on guys get right what u have before over burdening the controls side to back track and fix.

Quick questions to the colleagues here concerning Bome Midi Controller, I am trying to play with Bome Midi Translator Trial to see how this works with Rekordbox, I have an AKAI MPC and I would like to send MIDI messages from this devide to Bome Midi Translator then convert it to a key Stroke and them send it to Rekordbox in order I be able to access some functions in the SW that today there is no MIDI mapping available.

What I did I used as incoming MIDI message from AKAI and as outgoing the Key Stroke that I mapped in Rekordbox, when you do a test in Bome you see that everything is working fine but this is not taking any action in Rekordbox.

Anymody has any idea how to configure Bome Midi Translator to work in this way with Rekordbox ? What should I do in order to get this to work ?

Yes I tried it in Notepad for instance and it works fine, but in Rekordbox some time works other not, I did a small test to activate and deactivate the quantize sometimes you need 5 clicks to switch it on or off some times more than this.

It seems Rekordbox is reacting different as Notebad behaves with Bome Midi Translator.

Afternoon all, been busy mapping as always and not checking the posts, thanks for all your comments though, hopefully pioneer will start listenning soon.

So i'll answer the 2 of you who've asked questions to me directly:

Sérgio, regarding Bomes: Bomes is amazing, best money i've spent on a program for ever, I love it. However, it's changed recently to make it more accessible and in fact more controllable in the last 2 verions 1.8.0+, i'm assuming you are above this version now on 1.8.1, but let me make the point clearly: Now, if you use the "simple Midi" interface and not the RAW midi from the dropdown you must make 2 seperate translations for most midi controllers 1 for note on and 1 for note off and translate them to the same "keystroke" in your case, this is probably why you only trigger the event every other press of your button, it sends a note on 9x xx xx and then a note off 8x xx xx the next time you press it. Normally you should direct these sorts of question to the Bomes forum where the community is amazingly helpful and knowledgeable but this needed to be done like this for me to answer you so no worries.

Tristan, i have and it's not gonna help you i don't think. It's the limitation of not having control of the message sent and the subsequent actual value. Basically until Pioneer give us a seperate midi out interface, if your controller needs values not of 127 or 7F in hex to turn it's LEDs a colour or even off, then you're buggered. it doesn't listen to note off inclusively so my work around has been to translate all 8x xx xx note off messages to note on's with 00 as their "velocity" for want of a better word. So my APC sends say 90 35 7F as it's note on and it then sends 80 35 7F as its note off; so that becomes 90 35 00 via Bomes and then back to the APC i intercept again this note on value of 00 and translate it to 80 35 7F and the light turns off. but this is really long winded and annoying for every button and if i want colours 00 from rekord box becomes 1,2,3,4,5 or 6 in Bomes and the note on can be a different colour this way too, but man it takes so long to setup.

if your controller has a seperate midi code for it's light to it's trigger messages it gets even worse as rekordbox then needs a manual mapping on it's out column and then it still needs translating to make it not provide 7F all the time...

I started mapping my Kontrol F1 to simulate a 4-deck system like others have done using Traktor Pro 2, yet, quickly realized I could not use pages and/or assign a pad to a specific deck to enable other pads/buttons to only work for that particular deck. As Robbie pointed out these are somewhat serious limitations: remove midi limit control, modifiers - shift functionality, need for pages, etc...

So, I am now on "Hold" mode with the F1. I also dusted off and old Numark DJ2GO and an AKai LPD8 which are simple enough products to practice the midi functionality on Rekordbox. Again, I ran into many issues. As an example, for browsing in the DJ2GO, I used the Browse, BrowseBack and BrowseForward commands within the Browse midi editing/capture area. When I proceeded to use the controller, my browsing would basically toggle between tree structures while using the BrowseBack ("Back" pad on controller) instead of going up in the tree menu of the music folders. The BrowseForward worked at times, yet, not always.

So, is there a document that describes what triggers pertain to the midi commands that have been established in the software? (since it seems I might be using [or mis-understand] them incorrectly ,and/or, these are not performing to the intent)

I am hoping the SW team addresses these key lack of functionality soon. Though I am not a midi-mapping expert as many others, please let me know if I can be of service (test out a couple of products) as you progress through the development and future updates.

@ Robbie, thanks for the tip on Bome's software. Just bought it last night, yet, need to digest how it might be able to help me (or not) with the F1. I think I can send the multiple key commands via Bome, yet, not sure to how then translate these to the requirements on Rekordbox. (For example, how to assign a track to a particular pad of the F1, then use play and other functions via other pads to only work on the assigned deck) Will check at the Bome forum as well. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. Thank you!